Immortal Songs of Camp and Field

Far from de old folks at home.

All round de little farm I wander’d
When I was young,
Den many happy days I squander’d,
Many de songs I sung.
When I was playin’ wid my brudder,
Happy was I,
Oh! take me to my kind old mudder,
Dere let me live and die.

One little hut among de bushes,
One dat I love,
Still sadly to my mem’ry rushes,
No matter where I rove.
When will I see de bees a-humming
All round de comb?
When will I hear de banjo tumming
Down in my good old home?

    – Stephen Collins Foster.
Stephen Collins Foster has a very tender place in the hearts of the American people. His songs are marked by a tenderness and pathos which goes straight to the fountain of tears. Foster was born on the 4th of July, 1826, at Lawrenceburg, Pennsylvania. His native town was founded by his father, but was many years ago merged into the city of Pittsburg.

Young Foster had good opportunities for education in an academy at Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and afterward at Jefferson College. He had a genius for music almost from his birth; while yet but a baby he could wake sweet harmonies from any musical instrument he touched. At the age of seven he had mastered the flageolet without a teacher, and had already become quite proficient on the piano and the flute. He had a clear though not a very strong voice, but one that was under perfect control. As a lad he wrote his first composition, a waltz, which was rendered at a school commencement. The composition, coming from so young a boy, attracted a good deal of attention. His talent for music was so marked that he became the leader throughout his school days of all musical affairs among the students, and he was the center of every serenading party or concert. To compose the words and music of a song was his chief delight. He wrote the words first, and then hummed them over and over till he found notes that would express them properly. While he was in the academy a minstrel troupe came to town and he attended their performance. He succeeded in having one of his songs introduced into their program the next night, which greatly pleased the local public. This was Oh, Susanna, which was afterward published in 1842, and immediately gained great popularity. This aroused his musical enthusiasm, and he offered still other songs to publishers, and finally determined to devote himself to musical composition for a livelihood. He attended all the negro camp meetings he could reach, listened to the songs of colored people, gathering new ideas, and this faithful reproduction of what was up to that time an undiscovered mine of musical possibilities, was the secret of his great success as a writer of negro melodies.

Foster had a deeply poetic soul, and would go into the wildest ecstasy over a pretty melody or a bit of rich harmony. There is a certain vein of tender retrospect in nearly all his songs. Take Old Dog Tray, of which a hundred and twenty-five thousand copies were sold the first eighteen months after publication. There is something exceedingly tender about it: —

“The morn of life is past, and ev’ning comes at last,
It brings me a dream of a once happy day,
Of merry forms I’ve seen upon the village green,
Sporting with my old dog Tray.
Old dog Tray’s ever faithful,
Grief cannot drive him away,
He’s gentle, he is kind; I’ll never, never find
A better friend than Old Dog Tray!”

How often we say one to another, “It is good to be missed.” But no one has ever voiced that universal feeling of the heart as perfectly as has Foster in his popular song, Do They Miss Me at Home?

“Do they miss me at home, do they miss me?
’Twould be an assurance most dear,
To know that this moment some lov’d one
Were saying, ‘I wish he were here’;
To feel that the group at the fireside
Were thinking of me as I roam;
Oh, yes, ’twould be joy beyond measure
To know that they miss me at home.”

Foster was a most prolific writer, producing between two and three hundred popular songs, furnishing both the words and the music. Among his best known war songs are We’ve a Million in theField, Stand by the Flag, For the Dear Old Flag I Die, and Was my Brother in the Battle? His most famous song, however, and one which he hoped would rival Home, Sweet Home, – a song of which the soldiers amid the loneliness and homesickness of camp never grew weary – was The Old Folks at Home. For the time it has been before the public, it is probably the best known song in the world. Four hundred thousand copies of it were sold the first few years after it was written. The tune has crossed all oceans and become a favorite with martial bands of music in every region of the earth.

The author of this sweet old melody that touches the heart of all peoples closed his life in great sorrow and poverty. In the days of his youth and early manhood he was greatly beloved by all who knew him. He had multitudes of friends and in character was modest, unassuming, and almost as shy as a girl. He was happily married in 1854, in Pittsburg, but the bright prospects which he then had of a happy home life were eclipsed through his yielding to the appetite for strong drink. In 1860 his dissipation separated him from his family, and he settled in New York City, where for awhile he kept an old down-town grocery on the corner of Hester and Christy Streets. Some of his most famous songs were composed in the back room of that old grocery on pieces of brown wrapping-paper. Many of these songs that under the impelling force of his appetite for drink were sold for a few dollars, often brought hundreds and even thousands of dollars to the purchasers.

On the 12th of January, 1864, he was injured by a fall, and died on the following day in Bellevue Hospital, friendless, and in abject poverty. This brilliant man whose melodies were sung by hundreds and thousands of tongues, and to whom a single publisher had paid more than twenty thousand dollars of royalties on his music, died lonely in a great city, and his body was carried back to his native State through the charity of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. His funeral, however, was attended by an immense concourse of people, comprising both the rich and poor of Pittsburg who remembered his brighter days, and who felt that the city was honored by his genius. Musicians attended in large force, and the songs they sang above his grave were his own melodies.

THE BLUE AND THE GRAY

By the flow of the inland river,
Whence the fleets of iron have fled,
Where the blades of the grave-grass quiver,
Asleep are the ranks of the dead;
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;
Under the one the Blue;
Under the other the Gray.

These, in the robings of glory;
Those, in the gloom of defeat;
All, with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet;
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;
Under the laurel, the Blue;
Under the willow, the Gray.

From the silence of sorrowful hours
The desolate mourners go,
Lovingly laden with flowers
Alike for the friend and foe;
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;
Under the roses, the Blue;
Under the lilies, the Gray.

So, with an equal splendor,
The morning sun-rays fall,
With a touch impartially tender,
On the blossoms blooming for all;
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;
Broidered with gold, the Blue;
Mellowed with gold, the Gray.

So when the summer calleth
On forest and field of grain,
With an equal murmur falleth
The cooling drip of the rain;
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;
Wet with the rain, the Blue;
Wet with the rain, the Gray.